Pontiac G8 — Now you see it, pretty soon you won’t

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Turns out reports of the Pontiac G8’s death weren’t exaggerated after all.

General Motors, you may recall, had consigned the Australian-built G8 to the scrap heap when it decided to kill off the Pontiac brand next year. But the rear-wheel-drive sedan seemed poised to make like Lazarus when GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said last week that it might live on under the Chevrolet brand. Or not.

Lutz wrote in his Fast Lane blog this week that the G8 wasn’t going to make it.

“Not in today’s market, in this economy, and with fuel regulations what they are and will be,” Lutz wrote. (The eight-cylinder version of the G8 gets a combined 18 mpg.)

“I know that we’ll get a lot of complaints from G8 lovers, because I’m one of them. And the product guy in me is complaining as loudly as anyone. But the marketing guy says there’s no case. With budgets being what they are for the time being, the resources must be allocated elsewhere.”

Even so, Lutz stressed that GM had no plans to back away from performance or rear-wheel-drive models.

“Look no further for proof than the Corvette, the Camaro, the CTS or many other present and future Cadillacs. We have a strong lineup of RWD vehicles already and we will continue to have it.”

—Martin Zimmerman